Abstract
Numerous historical works have mentioned that trade routes were to blame for the spread of plague in European history, yet this relationship has never been tested by quantitative evidence. Here, we resolve the hypothetical role of trade routes through statistical analysis on the geo-referenced major trade routes in the early modern period and the 6,656 geo-referenced plague outbreak records in AD1347–1760. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation results show that major trade routes played a dominant role in spreading plague in pre-industrial Europe. Furthermore, the negative correlation between plague outbreaks and their distance from major trade ports indicates the absence of a permanent plague focus in the inland areas of Europe. Major trade routes decided the major plague outbreak hotspots, while navigable rivers determined the geographic pattern of sporadic plague cases. A case study in Germany indicates that plague penetrated further into Europe through the local trade route network. Based on our findings, we propose the mechanism of plague transmission in historical Europe, which is imperative in demonstrating how pandemics were spread in recent human history.
Highlights
Plague is initiated by the flea-borne bacterium Yersinia pestis, which circulates mainly on rodents and other mammal hosts through the rodent’s associated fleas[1,2]
Geo-referenced Old World trade route database prepared by Ciolek[24] and the historical human plague outbreak distribution in Europe by Büntgen et al.[25], this study examined the extent to which major trade routes shaped the dispersal of plague in Europe between AD1347 and 1760
To examine whether trade routes were related to the plague outbreak patterns during our study period, we started by checking whether plague hotspots were key trade nodes
Summary
We combined records of 6,656 plague outbreak cases in historical Europe and North Africa and the trade route database that geo-referenced the major overland and maritime trade routes during the early modern period (Fig. 1). The negative relationship highlights that more plague outbreaks were recorded when distance to trade port decreased, suggesting that there should not be any permanent plague reservoir in the inland part of Europe. We conducted a detailed robustness check on how the pattern of plague outbreak was controlled by the distance to trade ports over different specifications in spatial and temporal domains (Table S5). The relationship was robust and did not vary in any timespan or region that we singled out from the database This further confirmed the estimation that plague was repeatedly introduced to the inland of Europe through maritime trade ports in our study period. The result was verified by robustness checks in various geographical specifications It confirmed that local river channels, instead of major trade routes, were more significant in determining the distribution of sporadic plague outbreak cases in early modern Europe. Our results showed that the parts of Germany that were closer to trade routes, measured
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